Wish-weaver

In Which Ghosts and Bad Habits Abound at the Circus

Not being alive was bad enough, Rosie supposed, but never having lived at all was probably worse. She had no way of telling, not when she had never known real life nor death, and she was almost sure that she never wanted to. Not when, if her soul was taken, everything else about her would go, too, because physical bodies were for people who were–to put it bluntly–more technically alive. Not here, in a circus where she could turn spirals inside the huge, red-and-white tent, something beyond air, beyond blood and breaths and a ticking clock, a spirit ready to flit across a tightrope and bestow her daily minor miracle upon some lucky buyer.

Sometimes they could see her, sometimes they couldn't. Tonight, the woman she'd smiled at carefully (she always had to remember to smile, in case the guest could see her) had just looked on through Rosie, watching the face of the handsome ringmaster, and had let a grin drip across her features as gold sparks fluttered into a bouquet in her lap.

"A parlour trick," she mumbled to her tourist friend, who was sitting next to her. The tourist was clearly dumbfounded by Rosie's magic, but the woman at his side crossed her arms, a clear sign of something akin to fear.

Parlour trick.

It was a parlour trick, Rosie decided, and she waited for the tourist to meet her eyes. He was a strange thing, something straight out of a dream in the same way that a kettle came from a wish or taxes out of a nightmare. The normalcy of him, just like the rest of these people, couldn't quite exist in her world.

Perhaps it was she who could not exist in his.

It mattered not, because Rosie met his eyes and smiled, wiggling her fingers in a greeting as she stayed lounging a few feet above the ground, her right ankle crossed over her left and hands tucked behind her head as if she had sprawled herself across a sofa and was in no position to move anytime soon.

Perhaps she looked unreal to him, even though Rosie was as real as he was. She was just a different kind of real, the kind that came in the form of never having a form that didn't blur like clouds along the edges, with having a breeze for hair and mist for a dress, with having wind for bone and with having none of that as anything because those were just the closest human-minded approximations to the true thing that comprised Rosie.

The signal for switching between acts flashed at the corner of her eye as a man in a golden bodysuit with a tiger at his side strolled in, the man miming playing a flute while the real music played in the background. He had tried to teach Rosie to play a little while back, never mind that she couldn't interact with physical objects and he didn't know how to play.

It was just that kind of friendship.

The tourist on the bench pointed at her and said something Rosie didn't care to hear, clearly awed, but the woman next to him–a tour guide? A family friend?–just scooted a little farther away from him, as if he was crazy.

Another one.

Something blared from across the ring and Rosie spun a little twirl in the air, ploughed a curtsy through what would have been a breeze if she could have felt it, and let herself dissolve into nothingness, the lights flashing before her eyes in their familiar pattern: bright dark bright dark bright dark brightdarkbrightdarkbrightdark. She didn't look back at the tourist with the taste for impossibility because she sure as hell didn't care about who thought she was impossible–not anymore, not when she wasn't getting paid for this.

° ° °

Rosie wasn't quite sure where one reality ended and another began, but there wasn't so much of an in-between as a line she had started forgetting about before she had become everywhere and nowhere in her near vicinity. She had limits, just like any low-level spirit, but the sixty feet from the edge of the ring to the outside of the tent stayed within them.